


perspective

by daisysusan



Category: Star Wars: X-wing Series - Aaron Allston & Michael Stackpole
Genre: Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 20:09:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/299573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daisysusan/pseuds/daisysusan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Neither Nawara nor Rhysati ever expected to end up where they are now, but divergences from the plan aren't necessarily bad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	perspective

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kolamity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kolamity/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide to my lovely giftee, kolamity, and I hope you enjoy this. Many thanks to H for her last-minute help.

He could honestly say that he’d never thought it would bother him this much to lose a limb.

But then, he’d never thought that losing one would keep him from doing his job. In all honesty, he never imagined that he’d get injured in a way that some bacta and a good prosthetic couldn’t fix. Legal work, for all its risks, isn’t known for that particular one. And it took a special kind of injury to not be repairable. But that was kind of beside the point that it had never occurred to Nawara that something _physical_ might prevent him from doing his job.

After all, for all that it’s incredibly difficult to be a lawyer, it’s something that doesn’t really, specifically require him to be able to walk, or have fine motor skills in both hands, or what have you.

The fact that he had put so much effort into being _different_ as a child made it even weirder. There was such a warrior mentality, and he’d worked so hard to bypass it—and then ended up being a warrior anyway.

He’d gotten lucky, though, incredibly lucky. As it turned out, the things he’d learned when he was avoiding every warrior stereotype were what was going to allow him to keep his job, more or less, even though he couldn’t fight—couldn’t fly—anymore.

Nawara wasn’t sure why he was dwelling on the leg aspect of it so much; his life now was nothing like what he’d imagined it would be a few years ago, and there was no good to come from wondering how things would be different if he’d never joined Starfighter Command.

Besides, it’s not like this life has been all bad. Or even close to all bad.

He glanced around the room at the people listening to him speak, and smiles a little, because he trusted them and they trusted him and, really, the environment here was so much healthier than at any law firm he’s ever heard of. Not that he couldn’t handle the cut-throat competitiveness, even thrive under it, but not an easy thing to do—on top of the moral struggles from defending beings who were probably guilty.

Tycho’s trial was just a reminder of all that. Watching any innocent being—especially a friend—nearly be convicted of a crime and then sentenced to death was horrifying, but Nawara honestly didn’t believe it was much better the other way around. Seeing a guilty individual go free and knowing that you were the person who brought about that freedom didn’t make it easy to sleep at night.

Certainly, he’d never imagined that a job that required him to actually kill people would let him sleep easier than arguing cases in front of a jury.

Pulling himself out of his thoughts slightly, and glad that Wedge and Tycho were speaking now, Nawara caught Rhysati’s eye across the room.

She, somewhat predictably, winked at him. He strongly suspected that if they hadn’t been at work, the wink would have been accomplished by a lewd gesture of some sort, possibly demonstrating what she wanted to do when they were done for the day. Smiling back, entire too smitten to care that flirting with his girlfriend during a briefing was probably a bad idea, Nawara let himself relax a little.

Even down one leg, things definitely hadn’t turned out so badly at all.

 

Rhysati remembered people being half-surprised, half-not when she joined the military. She’d always been a bit of (well, a lot of, honestly) a wild child. Running everywhere she could, jumping off anything she could manage to climb up, driving too fast and drinking too much as soon as she was old enough to get away with it.

She’d ended up in the hospital more times than all her siblings (and cousins) combined.

The irony of it was that she was the first kid of the whole extended family to be properly settled. She had had have a leg up from being the oldest, but no one had anticipated that wild, rambunctious, untamable Rhysati would be, if not married, at least in a stable relationship that didn’t seem like it was going to end in the near future.

And with a _lawyer_!

Her little sister—never perfect, per se, but always closer to it than she was—used to joke that Rhysati would end up living with some crazy rock star drug addict who’d refuse to get married on the grounds that it was for losers or Imperials or something equally absurd. (For her part, Rhysati had never thought that marriage was such a big deal, except that it would keep her parents from rolling their eyes.)

Rogue Squadron was good for her, she knew. So was the military, letting her channel her desire to break the rules into something vaguely productive—as long as she followed _their_ rules. All in all, it wasn’t a bad deal, considering that breaking the rules (or the laws, for that matter) hadn’t done her a lot of good in the past. She didn’t actually have a criminal record, as such, but it was a very, very near thing.

And then when she started dating Nawara, his—well, his _lawyerness_ hadn’t seemed like such a big deal. He was a fighter pilot, which isn’t exactly the tamest job, and he was good at it. And he was all the other things she’d figured she’d want in a significant other—funny and brave and fun and interesting.

But then.

Well, now she was sitting in the briefing room and watching him—serious and composed and thoroughly professional—and all she could see was him as a lawyer. It wasn’t like she’d never seen it before; Tycho’s trial was a good preview, but it was all too frantic and stressful and, frankly, heartbreaking, for her to really have processed what it meant that Nawara was a lawyer. (A professional, with years of education and a job that probably won’t kill him and that he can keep doing even after his reflexes are shot or he loses his leg.)

She has calmed down a lot since her thrill-seeking youth, but it was still incredibly disconcerting to take a step back and think about the fact that she was probably going to be married to a lawyer someday.

They’d talked, of course, about their pasts and their childhoods, and she knew well before their relationship was anything more than a fling between coworkers that Nawara had been unusually smart and motivated, even as a child on Ryloth. (She, on the other hand, had fallen into just about every cliché for a rebellious teenager in a civilized system. Honestly, much as she liked it, it probably bore mentioning that she hadn’t had many options outside the military.)

However she’d ended up a starfighter pilot, she was certainly happy she had. Catching Nawara’s eye and grinning (just a little salaciously), she tipped her chair back on two legs—you can train a crazy girl to be good and honorable and dutiful, but you can’t make her a model of perfect behavior—and resisted the urge to make a crude gesture.

Frankly, it would be worth it just to see the look on Wedge’s face if one of his pilots propositioned his XO during a briefing.

(But she was a little tamer now. Besides, judging from the look on Nawara’s face, he knew exactly what she was thinking. And they had plenty of free time later.)


End file.
